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Euclid

A space mission to map the Dark Universe

Welcometo the website of the Euclid Collaboration provided by the Euclid Project Scientist and the Euclid Science Operations Centre. This site is primarily meant to the scientists and engineers involved in the Euclid mission. For general public ESA webpages about Euclid, please check the "Links" provided on the left hand side of the page.

Euclid is a space-borne survey mission dedicated to investigate the origin of the Universe's accelerating expansion and the nature of dark energy, dark matter and gravity. Euclid will characterise the signatures of dark energy on the 3D distribution of cosmic structures. In 2012, Euclid was approved as the second Medium Class mission (M2) in the Cosmic Vision Programme for launch in 2020.

The mission is optimised to measure apparent shapes of galaxies, which are distorted by gravitational deflection of light due to dark matter concentrations, and to measure galaxy clustering, that is the non-random distribution of galaxies in the Universe resulting from the action of gravity. Euclid demands very high precision measurements and the ability to survey the sky at visible and near-infrared (NIR) wavelengths. Such requirements cannot be met from the ground, and calls for a wide-field Visible/NIR space mission. For more information see our SciTech site, and in particular the "red book"

The sky covered by Euclid

During its nominal mission of 6 years, Euclid will survey 15,000 deg2 of extragalactic sky. The image above is the Euclid reference survey fulfilling all mission specifications, and is created for the Mission PDR in October 2015. The image is a Mollweide projection of the entire sky in ecliptic coordinates, the ecliptic North pole is up. The ecliptic plane (horizontal band) and the galactic plane (u-shaped band) are avoided due to sky background disturbance. Different colours indicate different years during the survey (image courtesy Euclid Consortium).

IN THE PICTURE 2016-12-22

ESTEC - 22 Dec 2016 - A very important and essential part of the instrument specification is the on-ground characterisation of the flight detectors. The VIS and NISP instrument teams have built facilities at MSSL and CPPM, respectively, to carry out the characterisation tests for all detector units. The tests will take a significant amount of effort and time in 2017, considering the selection of the required amount of 16 H2RG and 36 CCD flight devices. This is mitigated by testing two or more devices in parallel using more than one cryostat. The first flight CCDs will be delivered to MSSL for characterisation by the end of 2016, the first NIR sensor systems for flight will arrive at CPPM in March 2017. Photo: Magdalena Szafraniec preparing the CCD testing facility in MSSL.

IN THE PICTURE 2016-12-19

CERN - 19 Dec 2016 - The Euclid Consortium Lead, Yannick Mellier (right), together with Euclid's Project manager of ESA, Giuseppe Racca, visited CERN to present the science of Euclid as well as ESAs organisation and approach to construct the space mission. Euclid and the LHC share a common objective: detection and characterisation of dark matter. Highlights of the visit was to learn about the latest results of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) - the instrument residing at the ISS - and to see one of the CERN experiments, ATLAS, from nearby. They were hosted by prof. Peter Jenni, former spokesperson of ATLAS. Although ATLAS is about as costly as Euclid, it clearly has a more generous mass budget than Euclid.

IN THE PICTURE 2014-03-18

ESTEC - 18 March 2014 - It is motivating to see (and touch!) real space hardware, especially concerning one's own mission. During the kick-off meeting of the NISP preliminary design review (PDR), Dr. Frank Grupp (MPE Garching) displayed a prototype of one of the NISP CALA lenses. For many the size of the lens of 16 cm diameter was most striking, giving a better impression of the size of the opto-mechanical assembly of NISP. Left photo: Frank Grupp showing the lens, Right photo: telescope engineer Luis Miguel Gaspar Venancio and project manager Giuseppe Racca inspecting the lens.

In the spotlight: Sara Nieto & Pilar de Teodoro

April 2017

SaraNieto recently joined the Euclid SOC at ESAC.

Sara Nieto received the M.S. degree in computer science at Carlos III University of Madrid, and is specialized in software development and artificial intelligence. Before joining Euclid, she was part of the Maintenance and Operations Engineering unit for different Earth Observations missions of European Space Agency and EUMETSAT. Besides, she collaborated with CNES on the development and operations of radio frequency interference (RFI) detection in L-band in the context of SMOS. Finally, she joined Euclid as part of the ESAC Science Data Center which is responsible for the development and operations of the scientific archives for Astronomy and Solar System missions of ESA.

Why did you join the Euclid team?Being part of the Euclid team is the most exciting role of my career so far. As an engineer, I always focused my career on science and in particular on science derived from space missions, which in my view are the most inspiring fields. But joining Euclid means a step further in this sense, as it implies to contribute to the state-of-the-art technology solutions needed to understand the nature of the invisible universe: dark energy and dark matter.

What do you see as the biggest challenge in Euclid?From a software engineering perspective, the main challenge is to provide the user community with the most advanced discovery tools to retrieve the most valuable information from an unprecedented volume of data produced by the mission. For this purpose, we are working to develop a set of discovery tools accessible through the Euclid Science Archive to perform scientific research. But to achieve this high-level goal, working close to the user community is extremely important as well as understanding their needs and translating them into real solutions.

What about your expectations with Euclid?I am fully confident that Euclid will contribute to understand the nature of dark matter and the future of our universe and why it is expanding at an accelerated rate due to dark energy. On the other side and behind the scenes, big data, bringing code to the data, cloud computing, complex processing workflows are some of challenges that Euclid will face from an early stage of the mission. For these reasons, I am very proud of being part of Euclid.

Pilar de Teodoro recently joined the Euclid SOC at ESAC.

Pilar de Teodoro studied Applied Physics at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. After returning to Spain from Denmark, she joined Oracle Iberica to become a consultant in several projects in the technology area working as DBA, Application Server administrator and Portal Developer. More than 8 years later, in 2006, she joined the Gaia team at ESAC in the role of SOC DataBase Administrator and database testing manager. Pilar worked mainly with Oracle and Intersystems Cache databases while in Gaia. After working more than 8 years in the Gaia SOC she joined the ESAC Science Data Center (ESDC) where she works as database expert for the Euclid mission. She has participated in several VLDB, XLDB and PostgreSQL conferences. She is certified in Hadoop administration and is Oracle OCA 11g.

Why did you join the Euclid team? Gaia was a challenge from the database administration perspective and Euclid will be 100x that challenge so for me it was a natural move to join the next big challenge regarding data management.

What do you see as the biggest challenge in Euclid?Regarding data, the biggest challenge will not only be the data volume but all aspects on administration of these data, the metadata database that will serve the mission is a key component on the processing.

What are your expectations with Euclid?For a mission like Euclid we will need to use the state of the art technologies and I want to be part of the team who will develop and use them.